After much speculation over whether Mozilla, the non-profit foundation, and Google, the search and advertising company, would renew their default search provision deal, Mozilla has announced that a new multi-year deal has been made. The deal will see Google continue to be the default search provider in the Firefox browser for "at least three additional years".

What that initial announcement did not say was that: The search giant will pay just under $300 million per year to be the default choice in Mozilla's Firefox browser, a huge jump from its previous arrangement, due to competing interest from both Yahoo and Microsoft.

Sources said this total amount - just under $1 billion - was the minimum revenue guarantee for delivering search queries garnered from consumers using Firefox.

Google's main rival in the bid, sources said, was Microsoft's Bing search service, which was aggressively trying to hip-check it from the main search spot on the browser.